GQ's Read of the Month: James Salter's All That Is

"There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real."

So reads the epigraph of James Salter's stunning new novel All That Is. For Salter, now 87, writing is a sacred act, and it is only fitting that he begins his latest novel, the capstone of his half-century-long career, by paying homage to it. "Life passes into pages," he's written elsewhere, "if it passes into anything."

And what a life, and what pages. Salter is the man many of us wish we could be—West Point grad, fighter pilot, skier, traveler, raconteur, and, from his 1957 debut novel, The Hunters, which was based on his Korean War experience flying combat missions over the Yalu, to his best books—Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime—one of the finest prose stylists and most enviable American writers of the last half century.

In All That Is, long-time fans will find a fitting addition to his canon, his powers still at full force, while those who haven't read him will find an apt introduction to a writer who remains too little known. I count myself among the former group, which is why it was such a thrill, when, on a drizzly spring day two years ago, I interviewed him over lunch in Manhattan. At one point he mentioned, offhandedly almost, his novel then in progress. We had been talking about his solitary male characters—fighter pilots, climbers, skiers; people, as he put it, living "a life out of the ordinary"—when he mentioned the new book then about two-thirds completed. My ears perked up. "I'm writing a novel now about a book editor," he said, "so it's not the usual thing of a person striving to do something alone."

Except in some ways, it is. Over the course of three hundred pages, All That Is progresses through the rooms of a well-furnished life, tracing Phillip Bowman's adulthood from his time as a young man in the Navy up through his career as a book editor in New York. He is no adventurer, but he is solitary and ambitious, a priest to publishing, though by no means celibate. As we progress from room to room of his life, we find each furnished with another woman, as he wends through one marriage and a series of lovers and is buffeted by the tides of love (or facsimiles of it), emotion, and sex. In addition to sex and the relations between men and women, the book contains many of Salter's other long-time themes: action, honor, loyalty, and friendship; the devotion to a life well-lived, and the gulf between our imagined lives and our actual existences; and the recognition that the sublime and the sad, the highs and lows of life, are hopelessly intertwined. What's changed most from his earlier work is the vantage point.

There is a moment early in the book when an aging man—Bowman's wife's grandfather—confronts his flailing son and takes stock of his own life. "He could hardly construct how he had gotten from there to here," Salter writes, and that, as much as anything, is the explanation of this book: reconstructing the "there to here," plotting the waypoints of a life—war, college, sex, love, marriage, divorce, death, heartbreak, joy, illness, betrayal, redemption—and drawing the reader along for the ride. This is the view from the summit of life's hill rather than midway up its flanks. It is a story told by someone looking backwards with the benefit of a lifetime of accumulated knowledge.

That's not to say it's overly nostalgic. That Bowman works in publishing is a testament to Salter's lifelong love affair with books, allowing a sort of elegy for a publishing world long vanished, but there is no insistence that the good old days were any better. For all his outward success, Bowman is not admirable in the way others of Salter's characters are. He is flawed, he longs for a fantasy life he will never achieve, he can be vindictive and deceptive, pedantic and condescending, and he struggles with what it is that he really wants.

In thinking about Bowman, I found myself recalling something Salter said during our lunch, a seemingly throwaway comment about an aging mechanic acquaintance of his and the nobility of competent people, the casual poetry of which has stayed with me. "Nobody is interested in that kind of life anymore, but it's touching when you see them," he said. "It's like a dog walking along the side of the highway. You say, 'Look at that, that's a brave dog. I wonder what's going to happen to him.'"

Bowman is, in some ways, a cautionary tale, but he is not unlikable. Of the kind of men he admires and is drawn to, Salter once wrote, "I like men who have known the best and worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip." These men have seen lows, but only because they aimed high. "It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords." It is this taking of the good with the bad that keeps Bowman sympathetic, the recognition that life retains its magic, for all that one is bruised by bad decisions, bad fortune, or bad sex.

And it's the travails wrought by sex and love that drive this book. That Salter loves women is undeniable, and he revels, graphically at times, in the sensuality of the act. (Suffice to say that when NPR recently posted an advance excerpt of All That Is on its website, they appended the following advisory: "This excerpt contains adult content that some readers may find offensive.") But there is also a hefty indulgence of male fantasy throughout. Men possessing women; young women, beautiful ones, going to bed with older men, routinely; and Bowman's need for women who put him on a pedestal, women who will make him feel whole, like a man.

In the slightly retrograde sexual politics, Salter seems like an emissary from another time, bearing messages across the decades about the constants—love, loss, ego, attraction, sex, adultery, and the cycling nature of all of the above—that impel his characters through their lives. And he is unparalleled in his ability to capture things like: the joy of beginning a love affair or the sad tawdriness of unwinding one; the satisfaction of finding something that feels right, even if it's not quite what you'd had in mind; and the power of our minds to see things as we'd wish them to be. Here's Salter describing Bowman's love of his young wife: "He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter. Why would it occur? When you love you see a future according to your dreams."

In the end, this book, like much of Salter's work, reveals itself in the way small incidents and items—a meal, a night swimming in the ocean, a first sexual encounter, a pair of muddy boots in the back of a truck—accrue to something larger. He once wrote of the idea behind haiku, "Large things evoked by small," a characterization that applies equally to the genius of his own prose. Another line from our lunch—this one ended a discussion about the tension between loving to read and making time to write—alluded to this focus on small things rendered truly, believable actions and the grist of real life. "Well, there's no answer to all that," he said. "We're just talking about what it is, what it's like being in the water. It's wet, and can be cold."

When Bowman's mother is dying, he thinks of what's left of her life and what's gone before. "What had been her life, the people she knew and the deep pool of memory and knowing, had vanished or dried up and fallen apart." Writing is about preserving that "deep pool," which is filled up, drop by drop, with the ordinary moments that comprise a life.

There is ample rumination in All That Is on aging and death—the novel in fact closes with a scene at a funeral—and it would be tempting to parse that subject in light of the author's advancing years. But it's not a new theme: a preoccupation with time and its passage, with decay, with small decisions that ripple down through decades and alter lives, has been in Salter's work from the start. And it would be unseemly to be so morbid in the face of a book, and a man, so full of life and vigor.

"We are all poor in the end," Salter wrote in his 1997 memoir, Burning the Days. "The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare. Before that, however, is the performance."

I think back often to my lunch with Salter, which was a performance in its own right, in both his robust enjoyment of the food ("Oh my is that good," he'd exclaim, mid-bite. "Isn't that fantastic?") and his command of a conversation that ranged over the breadth of his life and much of mine. He was incisive, gracious, humble beyond reason, and relentlessly curious. At one point, after he'd been questioning me for ten minutes, I tried to steer us back to him, but not without protest. "This is more interesting, actually," he said, "but ok. Go ahead."

Our lunch ran long and when he realized the time he apologized and prepared to leave. I said something about what an honor it was to have lunch with him. "Oh please," he said, brushing off the flattery. "It was a pleasure, it really was." As I rose with him and moved towards the door, he turned and asked me, in a tone like a person addressing a slow child, "You're not planning on walking me out, are you?"

And with that, he put on his black parka and walked through the revolving door into the gray afternoon and was gone, merged back into the city of his birth.

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